The kit is supposed to represent the latest upgrades to the Super Cobra attack helicopter.  I'm sure Italeri did the best they could with the knowledge they had at the time, but the kit has many inaccuracies and shortcomings.  I corrected about half of them, a few I found out about too late and the others were beyond the amount of work I wanted to put in to this project.  For those of you who might want to do this kit up right, I'll point out of couple of major things that I didn't do.  The doghouse over the transmission on the real helicopter is much larger and higher than the kit represents.  Also, the horizontal stabilizers should be moved back, almost all the way to the vertical stabilizer.  Now on to the things that I did do.

I used the Cobra Company cockpit set for the AH-1W as a starting point.  The consoles were modified by cutting them to the right shape, sanding off some of the detail, and adding photoetch MFD's glued to sheet styrene.  A new row of buttons was added to the top of each console.  These now gave a much closer representation to the new Zebra model.  Cooling ducts were added to the seats by using guitar string, bent to shape.  The boxes on the pilot's console were wired, and a photoetch HUD was put in place.

On the exterior, I made a resin copy of a FLIR turret and installed it under the nose.  I noticed in the rollout photos of the Zebra that shrouds were put on around the exhausts, so I made them out of sheet styrene.

  I also noticed two small boxes on both sides of the helicopter, under the cockpit, so I added those as well.  A couple oil drain spouts and vent tubes were put on the bottom of the fuselage, made from stretched sprue.  The "disco light" was also replaced by a resin cast part, as the kit part looked pretty poor.

I detailed the Hellfire racks and missiles.  The racks simply received small bits of styrene to dress them up.  The missiles had the noses chopped off, and clear epoxy put in its place.  Well worth the effort, they look fantastic.

The rest of the kit went pretty much out of the box, even the decals.  I made up the paint job, I figure the chopper is not even in service yet, who's going to call me on it?  I did kind of a snakeskin pattern, nothing too elaborate but I thought it looked cool.

The kit is a welcome addition to my other helos, it's about as modern as you can get right now.  I do want to publicly thank David Campbell,  who supplied me with a wealth of information and advice, as I stole many of his ideas and applied them to my model.  He did a thousand things more to his than I did to mine, maybe we can all con him into sharing his work with us on ARC.  If the Steves will allow me, I'll plug his website here:

Hover Lovers Homepage
http://www.angelfire.com/ca4/hlmp/home.html

Kelly

(Click on the image below to load the full size photo.  Use your browser's "back" button to return.)